


New memories of dancing

by NuMo



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Fanfiction, Mentions past non-con elements, Post-"Equilibrium", mentions past gaslighting, mentions past identity issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 20:10:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14196804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NuMo/pseuds/NuMo
Summary: So last week, I readThe Wrong Side Of Heaven (And The Righteous Side Of Hell)bycommoncomitatus, and at the end of it, I just wanted these precious sweethearts to curl up and find some comfort.Oh who am I kidding, I wanted them to make sweet and gentle love. So I opened a new doc, setting aside the story I'm currently working on, because 'how long can it take to write a little bit of smut, eh?'Which promptly turned into 10K+ worth of comfort with the teensiest bit of sweet and gentle love-making at the end, because I should know by now that I don't write short stories.Anyway, here goes. I'm not sure if it makes a lot of sense if you haven't read commoncomitatus' piece beforehand, and I don't want to belittle that one by giving it a two-sentence summary over here. Go read it. It's amazing.This fic is heavily based on the (imagined) fallout of the events of the S3 episode Equilibrium and mentions the episode Second Skin.Un-betaed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Wrong Side Of Heaven (And The Righteous Side Of Hell)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1276077) by [commoncomitatus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus). 



It’s taken us months to get here.

Not back to Deep Space Nine, obviously, that’s just a few hours by shuttle, less if you go to warp. 

No, when I say ‘here’, I mean the point where Jadzia makes jokes without something dark lurking in her eyes either during or after. 

When I say ‘here’, I mean the point where first we acknowledged that we might as well move in with each other because we spent as many nights as possible in the same bed anyway, then we argued over personal space requirements, and finally we decided to move into two individual quarters side by side and with a connecting door. 

When I say ‘here’, I mean the point where we hold each other without feeling like you’re holding a jerry-rigged plasma charge that’s about to blow up in your face if you make one wrong move.

When I say ‘here’, I mean this, us, a relationship acknowledged and announced and accepted. I do not mean physically consummated, though. We’re not at that point yet; other points were more important to get to. 

oOoOo

We ended up staying on Bajor for ten days longer than planned. The vedeks were accommodating, either for Bareil or for ‘famous Major Kira’, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Commander Sisko agreed to my request immediately, proof of his concern for his ‘old man’. But even if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have cared. The only thing I cared about was how Jadzia’s shoulders hunched whenever I mentioned the runabout in orbit, how her eyes grew panicked whenever we talked about returning to the station, how her face twitched whenever she slipped and called it Terok Nor.

I know how it is to flinch like that at a thought, a sight, a word. Prophets, I know, and how I wished I could have spared Jadzia from knowing, too. Pampered, Starfleet, Trill, I used to call her, all of them meant to let her know that she could never know how it is to flinch like that. Oh, she acknowledged it easily enough, and as I got to know her better, I learned that she knew grief and knew it intimately – grief, though. Trauma, she didn’t. Nobody should. I took up arms, started killing Cardassians when I was barely more than a child, so others wouldn’t. 

And yet I couldn’t prevent my best friend from learning it.

From the moment she walked past me in our shuttle- no, from the moment that twice-forsaken Mirror-Sisko beamed into it, I should have stopped her. Should have shot him, her, should have shot my own damn arm off to show her how much I meant what I said, that she had no business going with him, none. I knew I had lost her to his cause the moment she insisted on listening to him, I knew what her decision would be the moment he started talking about his woman. If only I’d stopped his words, stopped her listening.

I suppose that’s my part to work through. 

I suppose we’re both really, really good at taking blame for other people’s actions, even if our only connection to those actions is that we had no way of preventing them.

She tells me so, when I try to put words around my thoughts on the matter, when I try to apologize for not doing more to stop her. Tells me it was her choice, _her_ choice, not my fault. I try. I do try to see it that way. I’m pretty sure she knows I’m not there yet. But I take pride at not having people tell me something twice, so I… haven’t brought it up again.

There are things I tell her a dozen times, a hundred times, but I guess that’s the same as her inviting me to dinner a hundred times, way back at the beginning when I was a fidgety major in a too-clean uniform and she a pampered Starfleet Trill. 

I recognize my distrust in her shudders, my fury in her flares of temper, my ache in the straightness of her back and the way she clutches her hands behind it. I tell her that after the occupation my rage seemed like it would never end, and she nods in recognition and I feel bitter, angry again on her behalf, that old, familiar railing at the unfairness of the universe. I remind her how my rage ran into a Trill’s teeth, how she smiled and smiled and kept smiling at me, how she never heeded how I lashed out at her in return. 

I tell her how I couldn’t stand that smile, and how much it came to mean to me, and that wins me a pathetic little double of that smile, and then a small, self-deprecating spark wakes behind it and makes it grow a bit steadier, and my heart sings to see it. She tells me in a whisper how much she loves my smile, tries to tell me that it transforms my face, the room, the whole universe, apparently. 

Two years ago, I would have brushed off such a notion, one hundred percent certain that no smile of anyone’s could do that. Possibly a good day’s work could, if anything. 

But neither of us is who we were two years ago, and so I don’t protest. If that’s how she sees me, who am I to argue? If that’s what gives her strength, even more: who am I to argue? We all seek our strength where we can, and if my smile is a source of strength for her, I won’t stop her. I certainly won’t stop myself from smiling, now that I know that’s how she thinks of it. 

I’m still not sure _why_ , though. Oh, I know _that_ she loves me. She’s told me, in words and in actions. I know that she trusts me, too, and Prophets, what a gift, what a weight. But pah-wraiths bite me if I know what she sees in me, Dax who’s over three hundred years old, Dax who’s lived and died and lived and died and lived, Dax who’s been up and down and left and right and halfway around the whole galaxy, Dax who’s on teasing terms with heroes and planetary leaders and queens and ambassadors, Dax who’s seen suns get born and go nova. 

Dax, who’s in love with a resistance fighter with not much more to her name than stubborn tenacity. 

She loves me, and she trusts me, and she can’t love herself right now and she sure as hell doesn’t trust herself. And while I love her deeply, I _am_ a fighter, and that means I know that trusting her isn’t the best idea right now. So I have faith in her instead, because faith has always come easy to me even if trust hasn’t. 

She says I know her, and in a way I do, but in another way, I very much don’t, especially now, with Joran thrown in the mix. And sometimes that bothers me, and other times it doesn’t bother me at all. Sometimes the thought of it, of all of her, of _all_ that she is, makes me want to run like hell the other way, and other times I shake my head at myself for being so stupid. 

I love her, and she loves me. 

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it. 

And if I didn’t mess it up back then with my distrust and my rage and my pain, I sure as hell won’t mess it up now, now that I know that I love her.


	2. Chapter 2

We come home from Jake’s birthday party one evening, still laughing about a prank he played on Odo, a prank he (and everyone else, especially Odo) swears Jadzia put him up to, even if she just as adamantly denies it. 

You wouldn’t think this is barely three months after… after the whole Joran mess; barely two and a half after the Mirror Universe mess. Seeing her tonight, you wouldn’t think it, but it _is_ the first time she’s seen more than three people at a time. And while you wouldn’t _think_ it, everyone who was there _knew_. It was Benjamin who kept it from turning awkward, this universe’s Benjamin who is one of the greatest men I’ve ever met, and one of the reasons for that is that he didn’t put the soft gloves on when he spoke with Jadzia, when he pulled her over to where he and Jake were on the comm with Jacob Sisko back on Earth.

The Prophets picked well in Benjamin Sisko.

We’re walking arm in arm now, she and me on our way back to our quarters. It’s a bit difficult with her being twelve centimeters taller than I am and in heeled shoes to match her party dress. It doesn’t matter that I’m in heels, too – Jadzia is _tall_. I don’t think I’ve ever walked quite this slowly, but her arm around my shoulders is warm for once and I can feel her chuckles on the skin of my arm around her waist, and so I very much don’t mind. 

When we get closer to her and my quarters, she nudges my hip with her thigh, and asks, “Your place or mine?” with that panache of hers. It certainly isn’t the first time she’s asked me that since we switched quarters to live side by side, and Prophets know it won’t be the last, because she’s Dax and she can’t resist a clichéd line to save her spotted neck. 

Instead of laughing, or rolling my eyes, or doing any other of the things she might expect, I stop and turn around to stand in front of her. Her arms come up to fully embrace me; they’re as sure as her voice just was, but she does raise her eyebrows and underneath, her eyes are vulnerable, thrown by even this little deviation from our routine. 

Yes, I’m wearing heels, too, but I still have to stand on the very tip of my toes to reach her lips, and I’m glad that her arms slip to my ribcage to brace me as I kiss her. 

Such a cavalier, Jadzia is. From what she tells me, Curzon was too, but only when it suited him. She kept the habit and expanded it; she’s a flirtatious cavalier one moment and a serious one the next, and this moment is as serious as the kiss I’m searing onto her lips. 

One of my hands comes up to steady myself against her chest, lands half on her collar and half on skin right where her neck meets her shoulder, right where her pulse thunders under my fingers. It’s certainly not the first kiss I’ve given her, not even the first to the mouth, but it is the first I’m taking this far, and it’s more heady than spring wine on an empty stomach, and sweeter, so much sweeter.

We’ve been dancing around this moment for a while now. I know it was hard for her when I denied her proposition that first time. Prophets know it wasn’t easy for me, but it was necessary, it was what I had to do. I know that she understood my reasoning even then, and I know she still understands why I have denied the other advances she made in the weeks and months that followed. 

It wouldn’t have been right for her, not back then, not in the months that followed. I know coping methods when I see them, and I know, oh Prophets, I _know_ how good physicality can feel, if not downright intimacy. I’ve seen it often enough, I’ve been there myself, but it’s precisely because of that that I know that this kind of intimacy is fleeting and can sour a friendship faster than bloodshed. 

And Prophets help me, neither of us needed that. Needs that. Not after acknowledging what we feel for each other, not after realizing how important we are to each other. 

But that was months ago, and we’re at a different point now, and I don’t have words for telling her that but who needs words when lips can be put to better use than talking?

It is my quarters that we end off stumbling into, and that’s as it should be, because it’s me who’s inviting her in, me who’s allowing this, me who’s done dancing. 

Her kisses are sweet and hungry and tender enough to break a heart and mend it again. 

“Are you sure?” she asks me on the threshold to my bedroom, and I’m glad she does. 

“I am,” I tell her, and step back just a little, taking a deep breath. She lets me go, but keeps my hands in hers, and I’m glad she does. “Are you? Would this be right for you?” I have to make sure. I know she loves me, I know she trusts me, but those two things aren’t all it takes. 

I can see the flicker of thoughts in her eyes, of memories and emotions. I can see her breath hitch and her heart falter. I can see the effort it takes her, the force of will she extends to acknowledge her fears instead of pushing them down. 

No, it’s not just about loving me and trusting me. It is also about trusting herself, and the emotional fallout of abuse that she hasn’t forgotten, that she’ll never forget. 

And as if she’s heard my thoughts, she smiles and says, “I want to make new memories with you, yes.”

I nod at that, and since she likes my smile so much, I don’t keep it at bay. “I like the sound of that.”


	3. Chapter 3

I’ve seen her shoulders all evening – she had been really, really overdressed for the birthday party of a fourteen year old boy, but I’m certainly not the person to argue fashion with her. 

They’re unblemished now, all bruises, cuts, abrasions long gone, skin clean and smooth as Julian Bashir with all his gadgets can ever make it, and yet all evening the image of those bruises, cuts, abrasions hung in front of my eyes every time I looked at her. 

It’s probably why, when we reach the bedroom, I press kisses to them, run my hands over them. She makes some remark about going strapless more often, but her breath hitches and I know that she knows what I’m thinking as I trace the spots over her clavicle and remember the vivid purple that drowned the brown here, the darker, redder brown that criss-crossed them there. I know that she knows that I’m standing where I’m standing, distinctly _not_ between her and the door, on purpose. I don’t want her to feel trapped; not tonight, not ever.

She catches my left hand, intertwines our fingers, kisses my fingertips. “I’m okay now,” she whispers. “Better, anyway,” she amends when I level a look at her, reminding her wordlessly of the nightmares that keep both of us awake four nights out of six, of the flinching and the puking and the panic attacks that are still constants in our days. 

“I know,” I reply, still running a finger of my right hand feather-light up and down her trapezius. “New memories, for both of us.”

She nods and relinquishes my hand, curls her hands around my jaw and slowly pulls me forwards. 

She comes close enough that I can taste her breath. Her nose nudges mine, first point of contact that makes me smile. Playfulness like this, I’ve come to learn, is all Jadzia, who certainly wasn’t the youngest to be joined, at least not in years, but who’s held on to a few childhood mannerisms nevertheless. 

Her kiss, hesitant as it is, is all grown up, though. She takes her sweet, sweet time kissing me, too, as if she’s committing every millimeter, every bit of skin to memory. 

I can’t help my smile growing under her lips, and she pulls back a little. “What?” she asks, eyebrows high. 

“This won’t be our last kiss, you know,” I tell her. “Not by a long shot.”

She takes a moment to process that. I find I’m holding my breath while she does. It leaves me in a rush when she smiles. “Good,” she says finally, and proceeds to kiss me some more. 

My breath is coming harder when she stops again. “Does it bother you that I’m keeping my eyes open?” she asks me. 

I blink. “I hadn’t noticed,” I reply.

“I know,” she smiles, and I roll my eyes while I smile back at her. Of course she knows; if her eyes were open, of course she saw I had mine shut. 

“I don’t mind,” I tell her. “At all.” And while we’re talking – “is there anything that I should or should not do?” I ask, suddenly nervous. 

Her shoulders hunch slightly under my hands, and I grasp them more firmly. I know this isn’t easy to talk about, I knew that before I asked, but I had to ask anyway, because I’d rather have her shoulders hunch slightly right now than have her full-on cringe away from me later. 

Her eyes never leave mine, and that’s something to take heart from. 

“With her, it was all power play,” she says after a moment in which memories cloud her eyes and flare her nostrils. “I felt so helpless, one way or another, even when I was taking charge. She… she manipulated me, all the… time.” Her teeth clench, and I bring one hand up from her shoulder to run it down her cheek, to pat and nudge her jaw muscles with my thumb until she relaxes them. 

“I won’t do that, then.” I try to keep my revulsion with the Intendant out of my voice, try to keep it steady, open, loving. This isn’t about the sadist who runs Terok Nor; this is about Jadzia and me. 

“I know you never would,” Jadzia whispers, leaning into my touch. Would, not could. Oh I _could_ alright; I’ve seen enough manipulation to know how it’s done. There’s barely anything in the world that disgusts me more, though, and so, yes, she’s right: I would never manipulate anyone I care about, and I’d rather cut my tongue out than manipulate her. Her words, her gesture, they both drive home how much she knows me, how much she trusts me, and I silently vow to honor that trust no matter what. 

“If anything feels off at any point,” I say out loud, “please tell me, alright? I mean, just because we’re in a bedroom together doesn’t mean we have to sleep with each other. The moment you feel uncomfortable about anything, I’ll back off. I promise.”

“I know.” The most peculiar expression dances around Jadzia’s lips. I’ve known her for years now, so I can read most of it, but with Joran in the mix, some of her expressions are just different enough for me to not be completely sure. There’s love in it, of course, and desire, but not just those. There’s anxiety, and courage, and stubbornness. Vulnerability in spades, along with the trust that goes with it. Elation, and pride too, if I’m not mistaken, and I’m not sure where they come from, but my discomfort with that is not the issue tonight. “Thank you,” she says, and now that she mentions it, I can see the gratefulness in her expression, too.

“Any time,” I say very seriously, and I mean it. 

She smiles, and repeats, “I _know_ ,” and leans forward and down to kiss me again. 

When she deepens the kiss, I gasp slightly, and for a moment, for the fraction of a second, she freezes and so do I. My eyes slam open and meet hers that hadn’t been closed in the first place. Whatever she sees in them reassures her enough for her lips to become pliant against mine again, for her tongue to resume its slow caress of my lower lip. 

Her hands are on my hips now, pulling me flush against her body. Mine are still at her shoulders, still touching only lightly, ready to let go at any moment. She’s an amazing kisser, which figures, with so many lifetimes’ worth of experience, I suppose. Not like I’m not, though. Her breath, too, is definitely coming more ragged by now.

Her fingers are toying with the hem of my sweater, thumbs drawing small circles on the fabric. She breaks the kiss only long enough to ask permission, then grazes her fingernails under sweater and over skin when I give it, and my knees go weak. I cling to her shoulders as her arms wrap around me to steady me. 

She chuckles. “I did not expect that,” she says, eyes sparkling with mirth. 

“Well now you know,” I grouse, locking my knees to regain some stability. She laughs out loud, head tilted back, and I can’t help but think how that bares her throat to me, and her eyes come down to my face and catch my expression and she shudders, all laughter gone instantly.

My hands sink down slowly. I swallow, unsure what to say. Should I apologize? She’s told me not to, right after she came back to me. Does that still apply? Here, now? Can I, should I be sorry for how my body reacts – my first instinct is to say no, because I can’t help it, I really can’t. But my reaction brought fear into her eyes, and I _am_ upset about that, I _am_ sorry that my reaction made that happen. So my next instinct is to wonder if I should have reacted differently, and that is not a productive thought at all, because- well, how would I do that? Do I need to check how I react to her every time before I let it happen? Prophets, sex is about letting go, and that’s not how that works. 

We definitely need those new memories. 

While all these questions shoot through my head, she’s there, tall and silent. She doesn’t pull away from me, and that’s reassuring. Then she detaches one arm to run slender fingers down my throat. I shiver, and it’s not a good one, and neither is the look in her eyes. “I hope you’re not into asphyxiation games,” she tries to make a joke of it in true Dax fashion, but her voice trembles just that bit too much. 

“Jadzia-”

“It’s okay,” she sighs, closing her eyes and leaning her forehead against mine. “Just… just give me a moment. I don’t want to stop.”

I nod, very gently against the head that is tilted onto mine. “I’m not,” I tell her, and when she makes a questioning noise, I elaborate, “into asphyxiation. At all.”

“Good,” she whispers. 

“I mean, typically I’m also not the type to go slow,” I continue; my own attempt at lightness. I take heart when she chuckles, and go on, “But I figure if you’re out of your comfort zone, I should be too.”

“How very brave and noble.” Her voice is gaining strength. With another nudge from her nose, to my forehead this time, she pushes herself off to look down at me. “New memories,” she says earnestly, grasps my hand and brings it up to her neck, flattens my palm against her aorta and flicks my thumb out and over her larynx, covers my hand with hers for a moment, then withdraws. 

I blink, and when I speak, my voice is the one that trembles. “What… Jadzia, what do you want me to do?”

“Give me new memories,” she says, as if it’s that simple. 

Her pulse flutters under my fingers, keeps me immobilized more surely than a stasis field. I stare at my fingers, her pulse, my hand, her spots. Feel her swallow, larynx bobbing underneath my palm. “Nerys,” she whispers. I look up at her, feeling helpless. “Nerys, please kiss my neck. Just-” she swallows again, “be gentle. Okay?” She gives a tremulous laugh. “No hickeys.”

I stare at her for a moment longer, then it’s my turn to swallow and attempt a laugh. “Okay. No hickeys. Got you.”

She holds my eyes for a heartbeat, then – 

Prophets, Jadzia. 

She closes them and tilts her head back, baring her throat fully and completely. My hand comes up automatically to cradle her head, and she leans the base of her skull into my palm, tilts her jaw into the inside of my forearm, exhales a breath along my skin. 

I can see her pulse going even faster now, but her body has stilled. In the silence of the room, the leather of my boots creaks a little as I lift myself up on my toes, and I’m glad for it; I _want_ her to know I’m moving. I bring my free hand up to her shoulder again, both to steady myself and to let her know I’m coming closer. Oh, the hell with it. “I’m coming closer,” I tell her, and my voice still shakes. 

She doesn’t reply, just nestles her head into my arm more snugly. 

“I’ll kiss you just below your jaw, okay?” I tell her, and when she still doesn’t pull away, still doesn’t say anything, I press my lips to the point where her spots leave her jaw to trail down her neck. Very, very briefly, before I withdraw again. 

“Again,” she says immediately. 

“Are you-”

“ _Please_ , Nerys.”

I fight down the urge to shrug and kiss the same spot again. She sighs, and it does not sound like she’s having a bad time. 

Okay.

I put another kiss right next to the first two, and open my mouth slightly. 

Truth to tell, I have been fantasizing about this – kissing down Jadzia’s spots. 

Then she tells me that they’re an erogenous zone for most Trills who have them, and my knees threaten to betray me again. “Wh-what?” I splutter.

“Again, Nerys, please,” she says as if nothing had happened at all. If anything, she presses her face into my arm even more tightly. When I comply with her request, when I dare to add a lick of tongue, her mouth drops open against the inside of my wrist, huffing out an explosive breath, and I have to hold myself up with my arm on her shoulder because seriously, my knees cannot handle this any longer. 

I tell her, and she chuckles, bringing her head up again and looking at me with such… fondness it’s hard to believe. “Why major,” she says, and I roll my eyes. 

“Can we _please_ sit down?” I ask, trying very hard not to sound like I’m begging. 

“I suppose we can,” she says, mischievous smile and all, sitting down on my bed with breathtaking grace. 

I follow suit, and it’s a bit awkward to kiss with two sets of legs angled sideways between you, but that’s what you have to do when you don’t want to block someone’s exit paths. You sure as hell don’t sit down on top of them, no matter how much you might want to. 

And if this awkwardness leads to us sinking down onto the mattress more quickly, who am I to argue? 

We’re facing each other, and the arm I’m lying on is going numb, but I don’t care. Jadzia is really, _really_ good at kissing. ‘Clever tongue makes a good kisser,’ I’ve heard often enough in the camps, and Prophets, is it ever true for Jadzia Dax. That tongue of hers darts, teases, licks, pushes, and I do my best to keep up. Every now and then, I let my fingers flutter over her spots – now that I know – and she shows every sign of enjoying it. When I break away from her for a moment to catch my breath, I happen to glance at them, and stop short. 

“Are they – do they-” I stutter, stunned. 

“They flush when I’m aroused, if that’s what you mean,” Jadzia replies, calm as you please, as if I could mean anything else. 

I swallow harshly. “I suppose that makes sense,” I manage after a moment, and she laughs. “Anything else I should know about Trill physiology while we’re at it?” I’ll admit it comes out a bit cross.

She laughs even more loudly. “Well, while we’re at it,” she echoes my words with a far too serious inflection for the look on her face, “they’re far more sensitive than my breasts or nipples.” And all of a sudden, her face falls, clouds, shuts down. 

I lean away and pull my hand back immediately, trying to give her space. Then I wait for her to collect herself. 

I can see how deliberately even her breaths come. I can see how forcefully her jaw muscles clench. I can see, on the one hand that’s up in the space between us, how white her knuckles are. 

I’m restricting myself to just lie there, breathe, not say anything. She knows I’m here – at this distance she can probably here my pulse, not just my breath, Trill ears being as sensitive as they are, my heart thundering as it is. 

After a long pause, she sighs and flops over onto her back. “She had a thing for breasts and nipples,” she says and my heart skips and stutters and stops because… well, so do I. Have a thing for them. “She… she hurt me,” Jadzia continues in a murmur. 

I want to tell her that I know, but I bite the words back. I _saw_ the wounds, barely scabbed over when Jadzia came back. The bruises, the carve lines, the tooth marks. And I know she knows I saw them. We were both standing side by side in front of that mirror, after all. 

“If you…” she continues, then breaks off. Searches for words. Reaches for my hand. Interlaces her fingers with mine again. “Are you… would you want to…”

“I could never hurt you,” it bursts out of me. “Never, Jadzia.”

“No!” she replies wildly, whipping her head around to look at me. “That’s not what I meant! Crap, Nerys, no.” She shudders. “What I meant was… I know breasts and nipples are erogenous zones for many species, and I just wanted to know if…” she takes a deep breath and forges on, “if you like them, if you like kissing them, caressing them. Or if it’s not the same for you.”

I inhale deeply too, hold the breath for a moment, let it out. “I, um… I do like them,” I reply, feeling like I’m stumbling through a minefield. “I mean… but… if they don’t do anything for you, if there are places that are more sensitive, that’s the main thing, right? This isn’t about _my_ gratification.”

“Oh, but it is,” Jadzia says with a frown and a squeeze of my hand. She rolls over to face me again, raising herself on an elbow. Her hair is falling from its ponytail, dancing around her face. “Yours and mine. Two-way conduit.” She lets go of my hand for a moment to point from her to me and back again. “New memories for both of us.” Her hand falls to the bed again and it’s me who reaches for it now, who wraps my fingers around hers and squeezes. “Nerys, I can’t help thinking that if what we have is to work out, I need to find a way to be sure, one hundred percent sure one hundred percent of the time, that you are you and not her. And that includes sex. That includes what turns you on and what doesn’t, that includes how you react to me and how I react to you. And it’s going to be hard, hard as hell, because there _will_ be similarities, and more, I _will_ confuse you and her, I _will_ slip up, we _both_ will make mistakes, but I’m willing, more than willing to tackle that because, Nerys, I want my damn life back and that life had better include you.”

I stare at her. “You’re…” I shake my head, lost for words. Brave, I want to say. But brave is what people call _me_ , call us resistance fighters when all we had to do was pull a trigger or plant a bomb or stab a knife, when all we had to do was not die, and even the ones who did die get called brave by the living. 

If that is brave, then what do you call the people who have to deal with trauma long after the dust has settled and phasers and knives and bombs have been stashed away, the ones who deal with their nightmares and their puking and their memories day after day, night after night? If you call us heroes, what do you call them? What do I call her? “Jadzia,” I breathe, because I can’t think of anything better to say.

She chuckles. 

She actually chuckles. 

“I am that,” she says, and it takes me a moment to piece together why she’s laughing, what she’s talking about. “I am that,” she repeats, suddenly almost serious, with only a smile left from her laughter. “And nobody else. All me. Jadzia Dax.” And runs that elegant hand down her length with a gesture worthy of a theater star. And when it comes back up again, it takes the hem of her shirt with it and exposes yet more spots, flushed as she trails her finger along them. 

This time, my shiver is a good one. My gaze is glued to her fingers, so when she brings them back up to her face, I meet her eyes, and the look in them is a good one, too. “At your service,” she whispers, and I swear she’s fully aware of what she’s saying; she has to be, doesn’t she?

It’s a bucket of cold water for me. “Are you serious?” I ask her, incredulous, possibly somewhat accusingly. 

Her face grows hard, and she closes her eyes and thumps the mattress. “Yes I am,” she grates. Then she runs her hand across her face and turns onto her back again. “I hate this,” she mutters. “We’re walking on tightropes, and I don’t want to anymore. I’m pretty sure neither do you. I’m tired of overthinking every word, every look, every gesture, every damned little thing.” She turns her head and looks at me, every line of her face taut. “Four months ago, ‘at your service’ wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow. Not one. Not from you, not from anyone else. Nerys, I can’t. I…” Her eyes fill. Her voice breaks. She reaches out to me and I wrap myself around her, hold her and rock her and run my fingers through her hair until she almost falls asleep. 

When I help her undress, it’s in quite a different mood than I thought it would be when we landed on the bed, but here we are. Another day over, another day survived. Another night to go.


	4. Chapter 4

She wakes up with a sobbing, heaving yell, pushes my arms away, stumbles from the bed and barely makes it to the bedroom door before she starts puking. When I get to her, she’s trembling like a leaf; I can see it even in the low lights we both like to have on at night. 

“Jadzia,” I call out to her, hand outstretched but not touching. Not until I know she knows I’m there, not until she tells me it’s okay to touch her. “Jadzia, I’m here. You’re safe, you’re in my quarters on Deep Space 9, you’re safe.” Until she acknowledges that she’s heard me, I’m keeping my distance, I’m staying out of the way to any exits or safe places. I know the drill. 

She stands doubled over, one hand on her knee, the other on the doorframe, knuckles white again and shins spattered with sick. She makes a sound that could be a sob or could be a heave, and her knees shake but she fights to stay as upright as she is. 

Brave. Hero. 

“Jadzia.”

“Nerys? Nerys!” 

She reaches out blindly, with the hand that was on her knee, and she immediately starts wobbling and snatches it back, but by that time I’m there to steady her. I don’t care that I’m standing in the puddle she made; Prophets know I’ve stood in worse for less. All I care about is that she can lean against me, that she nods when I ask if it’s okay to put my arms around her waist to make sure she doesn’t keel over on me. 

She’s stopped fussing about puke on the floor, on the sheets, on our clothes; there’s that at least. There’s cleaning equipment, there are replicators, there are showers, I’ve told her often enough. She does care about puke in her hair, but then who wouldn’t.

“Bathroom?” I ask her. “Bed? What do you need?”

“Bathroom,” she presses out. I can feel her tremors; it’s a miracle she got the word out at all. 

“Bathroom it is,” I reply, and put my shoulder under hers. 

Halfway to it she makes a quip about tottering like Emony at the end of her lifetime, and I make a quip about how she can just walk by herself if she can make jokes, and when we reach the bathroom there’s a bit of color back in her cheeks. 

I wipe off my feet and take the recy-cleaner to the stain and footprints in the carpet while she showers, because right in the middle of the doorway is not a spot where I’ll leave a puddle of puke for her to clean up when she’s feeling better. 

She calls for me when she’s done, standing in the bathroom doorway in a new set of pajamas and with a hair brush in her hand. “Would you mind?” she asks me, holding it up. 

I break into a smile immediately. I love brushing her hair. I keep telling myself (and so does she) that it serves a purpose, but when you get right down to it, I love it for the sensory pleasure, and so does she. 

We settle back into bed, with her in the middle of it and me behind her and leaning against the wall, and I lower the lights to five percent again. From the first stroke she leans into me, cocooned in blankets and low lights and warm Bajoran hands running a brush through her hair.

She tells me that she dreamed about having sex, ‘with her,’ she emphasizes, enough times that I wonder if she’s really all that certain. I hold my tongue, though, and simply continue to pull the brush through her hair. She tells me how it was ‘good until it wasn’t,’ and her voice trembles and again the knuckles on her fists are white. 

“Nerys,” she turns around so fast that I barely keep the brush out of her face, “Nerys, please, I…” and she falls silent again, mouth opening and closing, frown of confusion furrowing her eyebrows with delicate little creases. 

I put the brush down on the bed and straighten my legs on either side of her, make it easier for her to roll over them if she suddenly needs to leave. She notices – she always does – and her eyes fill again. Her head sinks down in defeat, comes to rest on my shoulder, and it’s an awkward position for both of us, so I shuffle down and she shuffles down, and at the end of it I’m lying flat on my back and she’s lying mostly on me and I close my arms around her very, very lightly while she cries. 

Tenderness always makes her cry harder, but she’s asked me not to stop, not just once but twice before, and so I don’t stop now. I hold her- no, I cradle her, light touches and fingers running down her spine over the fabric of her pajamas and up and through the hair that I brushed so diligently. On a whim, I braid it for her and she laughs, weakly, watery, and it springs apart when I let it go because of course her hair is soft and thick and glossy and won’t stay confined without at least one tie and seventeen thousand pins. “I never knew you could braid hair, Nerys,” she whispers. 

“Why wouldn’t I?” I ask lightly. 

“Well, your hair is so short,” she gives back, her face still pressed into my neck. 

“It wasn’t always,” I tell her. “Besides, it’s not like there weren’t other people around whose hair I could braid.” Giving up on the large braid for lack of a tie, I single out a strand and divide that into four parts and braid those. If it makes her chuckle like it does, I’ll braid all of her hair into neat little four-plies. “I started on my mother and father,” I go on. “Anyone who didn’t say no fast enough, for a while when I was little. Later, anyone who asked.”

“You had long hair?” she asks, honing in on that one detail, and I wonder if her chuckle was about my little four-ply braid at all or about the idea of long-haired teenage Nerys or little Nerys plaiting her way through a camp of refugees. 

“You’ll just have to believe me,” I say dryly, “because the only pictures of me that could corroborate my story are in my Cardassian files, and I’m sure as hell not gonna let you access those.”

“Odo will,” she murmurs, finally losing some tension in her shoulders.

“Good luck with that,” I tell her with a snort of laughter, and start on another strand of hair. 

“Nerys?” She burrows her nose more snugly into my neck.

“Hmm?” 

“I love you.”

“I love you too.” 

I’ve finished thirteen braids when she falls asleep. In the morning her whole head is covered in them and she pretends to make a fuss. I don’t mind one bit, because she’s slept for six hours straight and that hasn’t happened in weeks. 

She really doesn’t mind either, because she waits until after breakfast, until right before I have to leave for my shift, to hand me the brush to take them out. 

I growl but I do it, because she’s Jadzia and she could ask anything of me, and Sisko has been lenient about me showing up ten minutes late as long as I get the job done.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s getting easier not to check in on her while I’m on duty. 

That was a learning curve for me that absolutely isn’t at its peak yet. 

oOoOo

I’m carrying hasperat-to-go when I come home, and she’s sitting at her desk as I knew she would be, as she has been ever since she was declared fit enough to go through status reports from the scientific team. Her eyes are beaming, though, and her cheeks split in a grin, and that doesn’t really look like someone who’s been signing off on status reports for the last eight hours. 

“Benjamin and Julian greenlighted it!” she says before I’m halfway into the room, and is up and wrapped around my neck before the door shuts behind me. 

“Half-shifts in the lab?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure that no other green light could make her this happy.

She nods with the most sparkly smile I’ve seen on her face in a long time, and I beam back at her. Her eyes fall to the bag I’m carrying, and her expression brightens even more, if that’s even possible.

“Hasperat blanket picnic!” she calls out, and two minutes later we’re both sitting cross-legged on a quilt in the middle of her quarters, eating with our fingers and giggling over the latest of Molly’s antics. 

“Keiko called earlier, actually,” she says after finishing her food. She licks off her fingertips, but hasperat is tenacious, and she gives up, rolls her eyes, and wipes her fingers on her shirt while I shake my head at her. 

“What did she want?” And then it hits me that this is _Keiko_ we’re talking about – Keiko whose counterpart died, whose death Jadzia was responsible for. And yet Jadzia’s voice doesn’t even tremble.

“Ask if we could babysit Molly, as a matter of fact,” Jadzia says, completely ignoring the fact that I’m still holding the last few centimeters of hasperat in my hands as she moves over and lays her head down in my lap. “I said I’d have to ask you, of course.”

“When?” I put the roll aside. My appetite has completely evaporated.

“Earlier today?” she asks back, as if I’m a dimwit.

I blink. “No, I mean when does she want us to babysit?” _And why are you talking about this as if it’s the most ordinary thing to happen?_ I don’t say it; I even keep my disbelief out of my voice.

“Oh!” Jadzia grins. “Tomorrow, from the end of alpha shift till midnight. M’Pella had said she’d do it,” she elaborates, and her gestures would bowl the hasperat from my hands if I was still holding it, “but then Hartla came down with a stomach bug, so of course Quark called M’Pella in to work, and Keiko couldn’t find anyone else on such short notice, so she asked me. Us, I mean.”

“That’s a… step,” I say slowly. And it certainly is, when at Jake’s party Jadzia had a hard time even looking at Keiko, much less exchanging two words with her and the Chief. 

And suddenly Jadzia’s eyes grow serious. Suddenly, they grow pained. “It’s just babysitting,” she says, almost plaintively, and I’m sure the appeal is directed more at herself than at me. 

I bite my tongue so as not to immediately contradict her. It’s more than ‘just babysitting’ and we both know it, but if this is her path to come to terms with what it actually is, that’s alright. As long as she comes to terms with it before the end of alpha shift tomorrow, it’s fine. 

oOoOo

Babysitting Keiko’s child for eight hours is much easier than actually talking to Keiko for two minutes before she’s out the door to meet her husband. Jadzia’s a natural with children, there was no Molly O’Brien in the Mirror Universe, and the Molly O’Brien of this universe is the sweetest child on the station. Keiko’s barely gone for ten seconds and Jadzia and Molly are up to their elbows in paper and crayon while I go over tertiary system reports that have glared accusations at me from my desk for a week now. 

Molly does make a fuss when it comes to bed-time, but not enough by far to make me fear for Jadzia’s composure, to make me even consider that Joran could become a problem until, half an hour after Molly’s asleep, Jadzia mentions having been ‘the teensiest bit worried about him’ while we’re sitting on the O’Brien’s couch.

Prophets. 

All evening I was so concerned about Jadzia’s reaction to Keiko that I didn’t even think of the murderer Jadzia still carries around inside of her. I’m sure Keiko must have, though, and still she asked us over to take care of her child.

I curse my thoughtlessness in the privacy of my mind, extensively and empathically. 

“It’s alright,” Jadzia says, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking up at me with a wan smile. “Nothing happened, and if it had, you’d have taken me down. Why do you think I wanted you to come with me?”

“I thought Keiko asked the two of us to babysit?”

“Oh no,” Jadzia says with one short laugh, “well, I mean, she did ask, but only me. And I knew I wanted to, because it would feel so _normal_. I’d be able to do something, help someone, not just sit around all day reading reports of experiments and research I’m not even involved in.” Her face pulls itself into a frown. “But I also knew I couldn’t do it on my own. The mere thought made my breath stop. And then I thought of you coming with me, and it seemed so right and Keiko was still waiting for me to say anything, so I just…” she shrugs, “volunteered you right alongside me.”

I blink. I take a breath. My eyebrows slowly come down from halfway up my forehead. “Well, you know me,” I manage, “always happy to help.” I nod over to the stack of PADDS, all reports signed off at last. “Not that I did much of the actual, you know, babysitting.”

“That’s alright,” Jadzia says, leaning into me with a sigh and a smile, “we drew all the pictures even without your help.” And she nods over to the table and the stack of paper on it. 

“It is an impressive stack,” I tell her. My heartrate is slowing down at last. 

“So is yours,” she tells me, taking my wrist and draping my arm around her. “Good work all around, I’d say.”

“Speaking of,” I say, “when do you start with your half-shifts?” 

“Next week,” she replies, putting her feet on the O’Brien’s coffee table. Prophets, her legs are long. I mean, I know they are, but knowing a fact and having it shoved in your face like this really are two different things. “Three days from now, and I can work exclusively from the lab,” she continues in a dreamy voice. “Greta will field the requests in Ops and send anything up to me that I can do from up there.” She looks up at me. “I’ve already had thirteen offers for lunch, my choice of replimat or the lab’s food replicator.”

“Thirteen!” I know gossip runs like hara cats around here, but it’s been what, two days she heard from Commander Sisko and Doctor Bashir?

She shrugs. “Well, they’re basically standing invitations I’ve had since we came back, but it sounds better that way, doesn’t it?”

I shake my head. “Whatever you say.” I can’t help smiling, though. Lunch with Jadzia is something people vie for, something Quark tells me they use as stakes in high-risk bets. I’ve heard Morn offer a week-long vow of silence for lunch with Jadzia, for crying out loud; Morn! 

Of course she has standing invitations for it. 

Of course people have missed her. 

Of course people are happy that she’s getting better. 

One of the things I’m happy about, post-occupation, is that we have time now, time to deal with post-traumatic stress and shell-shock, time to deal with the less tangible wounds we’ve been dealt, those you can’t fix with a dermal regenerator or a doctor eager for frontier medicine. 

We have time, and Starfleet does, too. Benjamin Sisko certainly does. And Julian Bashir has come to know Jadzia Dax well enough to see right through any attempts at dissembling, any ‘I’m fine’ bullshit.

Jadzia actually tried, a week after we returned. 

He laughed in her face, in what I consider one of his finer moments. Oh, not literally, his bedside manner isn’t _that_ bad, but he did flat-out refuse to declare her fit for duty, and then he sat her down and gave her a list of counselors both Starfleet and Bajoran, and ordered her, yes, literally ordered her to find one to help her. 

I could have kissed him. 

I did grant his request for a fifth nurse, a second full doctor, and a medical internship a week later, which amounts to the same thing – better, if you ask me. A kiss lasts a moment, but he’ll have those additions to his team for the rest of his time here. 

“You don’t mind?” she asks me, and it takes me a moment to figure out that she means her lunches. 

“Of course not,” I reply, “why would I?” Jadzia thrives on meeting with people; everyone knows that who knows anything about her. She’s the most social person I know; I’d be worried if she’d keep refusing to meet with people. 

“You’re not… jealous that I’m not having lunch with you?”

I sit up now, because that’s not like her at all. “No, I’m not,” I tell her, meeting her eyes very seriously. “Jadzia, we…” I shake my head, trying to find the right words. “You can spend your time, your lunch, whatever, with whoever you like. If it’s me, great – you know I like spending time with you. If it’s someone else, also great – I know you like spending time with lots of people, and lots of people like to spend time with you. And it’s not like lunch is an exclusive thing, you know; the tables at the replimat do seat more than two people at a time. You can have lunch with me _and_ someone else, or with several someone elses, or-”

She stops my words with a kiss, one that’s just as serious as my diatribe has been. 

Four days later, we have a hasperat picnic lunch on a blanket in her lab in Upper Pylon One.


	6. Chapter 6

Two weeks later, three days after Jadzia’s started working in Ops again, the Cardassians abduct me and try to convince me I’m one of theirs. 

I can’t say it’s an identity crisis; not really, not after what Jadzia’s been through, what she’s still going through. 

And yet, as I sit on my couch running Ghemor’s daughter’s bracelet through my hands, around and around and around, my thoughts spin with it. 

For a moment, only for a moment, I was on the cusp of believing them. For a moment I doubted my entire life. 

Prophets, I hate them. I hate the Cardassians and that they just won’t leave us alone. The occupation is over, why can’t I just be done with the lot of them?

And yet… 

And yet Tekeny Ghemor is an honorable man. A man who loves his daughter, a man who would have loved me as his daughter, a man who was honorable to me. A man who has lost everything through a plot I was part of. 

My fingers tighten around the bracelet. Iliana Ghemor. I want to find her. I don’t care if she’s a deep cover agent, I want to find her and reunite her with her father. He’s Cardassian, she’s Cardassian, all of this is an exclusively Cardassian business except for, as usual, the Bajorans they hurt with it. But I don’t care this time; he deserves it. And if she’s dead, he deserves to know, deserves to learn it from a sympathetic source, not from a cold-blooded Obsidian Order operative. 

My thumb rubs around and around the purple gemstone set into the bracelet. How can I find her? The only thing I know is that she looks like me. 

“Easy,” Jadzia grins when I tell her. It’s after dinner and we’re stretched out on her couch – mine’s too short for both of us _and_ her legs. “I’ll go to Odo and tell him I want to see every picture he can find of you during the Cardassian occupation.” She can’t possibly see me rolling my eyes, because she’s the one holding me tonight, but she laughs nevertheless. “I’ll say I can’t stop thinking about seeing you with long hair. I’ll talk him into it, don’t worry. And then you and I will go through every picture he finds, see if you recognize where and when it’s from, and if we find one that you don’t recognize, we’ve got a lead.”

“You _are_ obsessed with my hair,” I accuse her half-heartedly, but apart from how I feel about that particular part of the plan, the rest of it is actually sound. It’s in character for her, and it won’t alert anyone to what we’re looking for, _who_ we’re looking for. 

“But it’s such beautiful hair,” she whispers, running her fingers through it. 

“Better than what I woke up with on Cardassia, that’s for sure,” I press out through gritted teeth. 

“Nerys.” She turns my chin around so that I look at her. Kisses the spot on my forehead where days ago a grey spoon-shaped dip made me reel. Runs her finger across my eyebrow and under my eye, trailing no-longer-existent ridges. I’ll swear it’s the lamp on the table behind her that fills my eyes with tears; it’s too bright and I’ve complained about it before. 

Her eyes, her fingers, her lips are tender enough to break a heart and mend it again, and I guess it wasn’t the lamp after all, because I cry in her arms long into the night.

oOoOo

I haven’t dreamed of the camps in a while now – ten days? Two weeks? – but this night, I do. I wake with a yell that’s blessedly silent, because silence was survival in the camps and some things stay with you. 

When I look at Jadzia to make sure I didn’t wake her, I meet her eyes and mine slide shut. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. 

“You didn’t wake me,” she replies, opening her arms for me. “I had one of my own earlier. It’s alright,” she assures me when I search her face, tugs my shoulder down to get me settled into her embrace. She sounds certain enough, and my heart’s still pumping, so I follow her gesture and let her wrap her arms around me. 

She keeps her silence, but sometimes her silences are louder than anything she could say. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I reply to what she isn’t asking. 

“Alright,” she says easily, and kisses my hair. 

I press my lips together and run my arm around her, inching closer until I’m fully wrapped around her body. And still I can’t stop my trembling. She runs a finger down my spine and I shiver violently, but at least that’s something to concentrate on that’s not the screams and groans of people dying next to me that keep ringing in my ears. 

As if she knows, Jadzia starts to sing, low, slow, gentle – a song that I almost recognize; it sounds nice. I’m too wound up to fall asleep again, but at least my heart is beating more slowly when she’s done. 

“What was that?” I ask. 

“Trill lullaby,” she explains. “It’s quite old; Lela sang it for Ahjess – tried to, anyway.”

Now I know why it felt a little familiar. “Odd,” I reply after a moment. “I did feel like I knew it. I couldn’t put a name to it, so I figured I must’ve heard it somewhere.” I smile. Lela does surface from time to time, like a friend you haven’t heard from in a while but whose comments are welcome anyway. Then I remember something about Dax, and my shoulders tense immediately. “You… sounded good.” I try to pass it off as an off-hand comment, but how can I, when Jadzia’s arm is around the shoulders I just hunched?

She sighs. “You know, I’ve always regretted not being able to sing, carry a tune, play an instrument.” She sounds remarkably unaffected, so my shoulders release a bit of their tension. “Curzon loved Klingon operas, and he would have loved it even more to belt them out alongside his friends, but as it turns out, even Klingons have a pain threshold for bad singing, so they stopped him.” She chuckles with the memory, and I relax a little more. Then her voice turns serious. “Integrating a host’s memories and personality always means both the good and the bad. And Joran’s musical talent was undeniable. I tried playing the piano before… before you and I left for Bajor, but that was… too early. Too close. I tried again after we came back, when you’d be gone for your shifts. But muscle memory can take the next host only so far, so I dropped it again; I was too bad at it and that just made me angry.” She tightens her arms around my shoulders and takes a deeper breath. “So I took up singing. And I found that I can, in fact, carry a tune.” There’s a smile in her words now, and I raise myself up just to see it, just to let her see my answering smile. 

“Sing it again for me?” I ask, and look at her while she does, my hand on her shoulder and my chin on it, and her eyes on mine the whole time. When she sings it again for the third time, I join in and that wakes a smile on her face that lights up the whole room. 

“I didn’t know _you_ could sing!” she calls out when we’re done, and I fight to make my smile turn mysterious. 

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet, lieutenant,” I say with a sidelong glance, and she grins. 

“All the more incentive to weasel it all out of you, Odo, or anyone who knows anything,” is her reply. 

A roll of my eyes is mine. 

Our kiss is sweet, our smiles and good mood dancing through it like the last pair of revelers at a springfest, when the music is soft and the fire has burned down. 

She hums a moan into my mouth when I run my tongue across her lip, and it’s sweet and happy and free.

I hum a moan into her mouth when her hand cups my breast, and it’s sweet and joyful and urgent. 

Her sighs are a melody, her huffs of breath its punctuation. At some point, we shift – it’s my arm around her shoulders now, and Prophets am I glad her legs are so long and her torso so short, because that means I can keep my arm around her shoulders as my fingers enter her, keep her cradled as I stroke her, keep her eyes on mine until she closes them in release. It’s a song we’re making, a soothing, pulsating, resonating anthem, my name its refrain, our heartbeats its percussion. 

I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the tiny little frown of concentration between her eyebrows when she comes. 

When she opens her eyes again, tears spill out, but they’re free tears, happy and sweet, another form of release, another expression of joy. Love still dances through the two of us, a steadily swinging pendulum of back-and-forth, left-and-right, up-and-down. I hum as I hold her, in one-two-three rhythm like her heartbeat, like mine; find an old Bajoran tune to rock her by until her tears run dry.

She laughs when my song winds down, sweet and happy and free, showers the softest kisses all over my face, wets my skin with her tears – I’ll never tell her that some of them were mine, I vow to myself, and then I look into her eyes and know that she knows anyway. 

I close my eyes, then, not because I can’t meet hers, but to show her my trust. Her fingers are gentle, and gently trembling, and her questions – would I like this, should she do that – are more hesitant than mine were, but she has a clear aim in mind and her focus is true. 

She commits every bit of my skin to memory, I swear, and it would drive me insane if this wasn’t Jadzia, if I didn’t know why she’s doing it. She asks me if I would mind if she told me about differences and similarities, and I swallow and nod and she lists them, not quite detached, but not upset, either. Scarred in different spots, but ticklish in the same ones – most of them, anyway. The amount of overlap of erogenous zones is frightening, but she assures me our reactions differ wildly. 

Her exploration of my body proceeds far more slowly than I would ever have patience for otherwise, but this is Jadzia, this is for her far more than it is for me, and she does have a clear aim in mind, and a true focus. 

I come with a… a _yell_ that startles me – I meant it about the silence in the camps; it was courtesy if nothing else. Apparently my consternation shows on my face because she laughs out loud, joyful and happy and free. That’s what I open my eyes to – my laughing Jadzia, my Dax.


End file.
